Tech

Suspended Kickstarter project Anonabox resurfaces on Indiegogo

Anonabox, the plug-in Internet router that claims it makes your online activity anonymous, is back from the dead after Kickstarter suspended the controversial project last month. The developers are attempting to capture the attention of crowdfunders once again, this time on Indiegogo.

The project has raised about $16,500 since Nov. 8 on Indiegogo, already surpassing a modest goal of $13,370. Anonabox is supposed to cloak your digital identity by plugging in or connecting to your computer and running Tor, software that is widely believed to be one of the best privacy tools on the web.

A controversy erupted around Anonabox after its hugely successful Kickstarter campaign in October: The developers made questionable claims about the device's "custom" hardware. Redditors — and, later, Kickstarter itself — came to believe that Anonabox's developers had either misrepresented the origins of the device's hardware or, worse, passed off someone else's work as their own. The router was a dead ringer for an off-the-shelf Chinese router, for example.

Anonabox's detractors also argued that it did not have truly open source software and hardware. For a product to be "open source," they said, people should be able to examine and experiment with the makings of the device to ensure that everything is secure. If Anonabox didn't even own some of the hardware used to manufacture the routers, as some claimed, how "open source" was it really? Without those checks, there would be a bigger opportunity for hackers to exploit security back doors.

Kickstarter froze donations to the router, which had been fielding a growing amount of backlash. At one point, donors had pledged more than $600,000, but all that was canceled once Kickstarter axed the project.

With rival crowdfunding site Indiegogo, the designers are getting a second chance to produce and sell the gadget, which costs $51. On the Indiegogo page, the makers of Anonabox at least partially acknowledge the controversy, saying they "got a lot of input from developers and the Open Source community as well."

"The attention and feedback we received was enough to make the device better than ever," they wrote.

The new version is called "gen 5," and its updates are supposed to address previous criticisms. The makers describe them this way:

All new totally custom circuit board available nowhere else in the world

Redesigned outer case and smaller form factor (images of the new case will be posted in the updates!)

Hardened version of OpenWrt the Open Source Operating system,

Latest version of Tor software and more secure configuration.

Automatic updates of Tor software (no need to configure!)

And in a campaign video posted Oct. 29, the designers still claim that Anonabox is "100% open source."

August Germar, the lead developer for Anonabox, had become the main target of the Kickstarter campaign's critics after he held an AMA on Reddit. Many thought his answers and behavior during the Q&A were evasive. In the days following the AMA, Germar reversed some of the claims he had made to Wired, and support for the project began to cave in.

Critics already seem to be gearing up to scrutinize Germar and Anonabox once again. The Indiegogo campaign says that Germar "volunteers for the Tor support forum the Tor Stack Exchange, and is an admin for the official Tor project discussion page on LinkedIn," but privacy researcher Runa Sandvik, who's listed as a "core person" on Tor's website, said on Twitter that those claims weren't true.

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